Tonight I'm Someone Else

by Chelsea Hodson

  With their boat anchored near a kelp bed, a navy instructor briefed Clark and a group of men on the signals used underwater for speaking to the ship: One tug on the signal cord by the diver tells the tender, “I’m all right.” Two tugs meant “Give me more line, I’m going farther away,” three tugs meant “Take up slack, I’m coming in closer,” and four tugs meant, “Danger, pull me up fast.”

  When Clark went fishing with her spear, she wrote, It’s one thing to look down at the reefs through a glass-bottomed box or boat—another to be under the sea yourself, swimming freely among the reefs and seeing clearly in every direction. I like Clark’s descriptions of spear fishing and of the satisfaction of seeing something and making it hers.

  Are you going undercover? the librarian asked me once as I checked out books about private investigators. I said, If I were, do you think I’d tell you?

  In Brooklyn, I live with my partner, Mark, who says the most wonderful things sometimes. Last week, he said, Sometimes it feels like we’re in the future. I can’t explain it; it’s just this feeling that we’re not in the right time. I knew what he meant by that. Some days felt very long, some days felt impossibly short. I felt as if time couldn’t exist the way clocks insisted it did. There was no way I could possibly be wasting this much of my life.

  Last year, Mark went to Germany for three weeks to show his drawings at a gallery. I was left alone in our apartment and, after two weeks, I began hearing a bird in the backyard. I texted Mark, It’s like a bird from the jungle, unlike anything I’ve ever heard. I didn’t hear it all the time, but when I did, it was all I could hear. I had to leave the room or put headphones on. It sang the same notes each time, like a ringtone—piercing and exact. I put my phone near the window to try to record it to send to Mark in Germany, but when I played the recording back, I couldn’t hear the bird at all.

  One night I woke up at three in the morning to the sound of the bird. I groaned, got up to get my headphones from the other room, turned on my white noise app, and went back to sleep. When I awoke hours later, the bird was still chirping wildly. I wondered if it’d be there forever. Mark and I always joked that as soon as we got rid of one sound nuisance, another emerged. When the upstairs neighbor quieted her barking dog, another neighbor paced outside our window, talking on the phone. One sound replaced another. Hearing the shrill backyard noise, I texted Mark, The mystery bird is the new enemy of silence.

  When Mark returned, I said, If you hear the bird, you’ll know it right away; it’s the worst. And yet it’s been silent since you’ve been back. As soon as he asked, Are you sure you didn’t imagine it? I realized I might have.

  Most people with auditory hallucinations hear voices, like Joan of Arc and the saints in her head, but I’ve found some cases of hearing music without any auditory stimulus. Mental disorders like schizophrenia can cause auditory hallucinations, but so can stress, starvation, depression, and lack of sleep. Many people hear voices or music right before they go to sleep or when they wake up from a dream.

  I knew a schizophrenic girl in high school who hallucinated forest scenes wherever she went—deer, trees, garden gnomes. There’s one, she’d say to her boyfriend, and he’d turn to look. That’s how we knew he loved her.

  So what if there’s no explanation for what I heard? What if there’s no way to know for sure, no trauma to the brain? I could be unexplained, which means anything is possible, which means I see the water and think it’s the sky.

  Clark wrote that the earliest fish had three eyes, and their fossils show a small opening in the center of the skull. This held the pineal eye—the one that looked for light.

  It seems I might be able to pretend anything into existence. I can paint a portrait in my mind and I never have to show it to anyone. It might be my greatest work: inventing the problems of my life.

  Uncertainty, I address you because you are the problem, like when I was unqualified to teach middle school but I taught it anyway. One boy was so bad that I lost any authority I might have faked early on—the class became nothing more than a scheduled time each day devoted to paying attention to him. I wrote math equations on the whiteboard, but no one learned anything besides what my voice sounded like when I said you. I wondered if this was how great men were made. I wondered if I was making one.

  No one was in the burning car, no one was in danger. It was roped off; it was Los Angeles at night, of course it was a movie. Now the image serves as an anchor—I can’t help but return. How many truths have I blazed through, not listening? Take up slack, I’m coming in closer. I will find my way back to the beginning, back to you.

  I once knew a man with a reputation so bad that I decided I needed to see him up close, examine him like a bottle of something that makes you forget. I don’t know what I thought I’d find—nothing is hidden. Everyone is so obvious, and we flatter ourselves by thinking otherwise. But lust defies all logic, and thank god for that. No one ever fell in love with a math equation. Or if they did, they married it and lived in a place I never saw, a place where people live happily ever after, and that’s not New York.

  In New York, I met the man with the reputation at the bar with the televisions. Talking about the art museum, he said trident, held up three fingers, asked, Is that what I mean? I thought he meant triptych, but I didn’t know for sure. We barely knew each other that night, but it was an intimate question because he asked me to enter his mind, to find his meaning for him, so I did.

  I moved my hand from the edge of the bar to my glass so slowly that I thought he might say something, but he didn’t notice. When I washed my hands in the bar bathroom later, it was religious how long I took to lather my hands and reapply my lipstick. With every movement my body made, I grew further from myself until I was all pretend, I was other. I slowed down the process so I wouldn’t miss it. But then he kissed me, and it felt like the start of a race. Go.

  We walked in the cold back to his apartment, and I liked the way our shadows appeared and disappeared under the streetlights. I liked who I was with him, I knew it right away, and I became very focused. If it weren’t for the red numbers on his clock, time wouldn’t have passed or I wouldn’t have thought about it. Anything seemed plausible, that’s what uncertainty did. My heart was a dictator, and I invaded lands on its behalf. His room: mine. His bed: mine. His toothpaste I squeezed onto my index finger and rubbed against my gums: also mine. In bed, I held his arm up by the wrist and named his hand after me. I’d found him.

  Lust resists meditation and encourages impulse. Lust absorbs everything, especially insight. My lust conceals the faces of strangers: Is he there? Or there? Everyone could be him.

  (Did I keep you alive by looking at you? I’d like to think that.)

  Strangers are the only perfect people—that’s why I keep collecting them, that’s why I see myself as a stranger and I love her better. I barely know her.

  I wore salmon-colored cotton underwear the first time a boy touched me. His dog’s name was Chelsea, and he told her to leave the room.

  The Starbucks cashier in Midtown motioned for me to step down to his register. He must be seven feet tall, I thought as I handed my credit card to him. He looked at it, said Chelsea. That was the first time I’d heard my name spoken out loud in days, and he seemed to notice the stirring this provoked in me. Chelsea, Chelsea, getting her coffee, he said, returning my credit card to my open palm, Chelsea, Chelsea, leaving me.

  Everything has its opposite, a mirror version of what it could be, if only: moon and satellite, island and houseboat, monument and illusion.

  I remember the view from my friend Sarah’s trampoline in her backyard. When we bounced high enough, we could see her neighbor, asleep in a lounge chair beside his pool. He was fit and tan, and his stomach muscles glistened like a cartoon. With every leap, we caught a glimpse of him and stored him away for later.

  But what about the boy from our class who lived four doors down from the trampoline? What about the garage where he used his father’s gu
n to shoot himself in the tenth grade? What about the girls who mocked him relentlessly when he was alive and cried for themselves when he wasn’t? What about the way the swim team lit candles in the pool in his memory? What about the time in sixth grade when he found out I liked dogs, so he stole a copy of Dog Fancy from the library and gave it to me? What about the time I saw him slam his head repeatedly against a cafeteria table just to make someone laugh? What about the way I laughed? What about the things I didn’t do because of the things I couldn’t know? If only Sarah and I had looked in the right direction, maybe we could’ve seen him in his backyard all those years before he died. If only we’d known where to look, if only we’d been kinder.

  Clark on the ocean floor: Walking toward the dark mass, I got close enough to see that it was a cluster of rocks. It had holes in it like windows, and lovely lavender sea anemones, abalones, shellfish, and sponges decorated it … I decided not to get too close. I walked around it.

  You don’t have to hide, I often tell people right before I hide. Sanity is a way of seeing the world and comprehending it, understanding its scope. I see a glimpse, then turn away. But I imagine madness is a way of seeing everything at once. One does not become mad, one goes mad, like a place, like a museum where all the paintings are real and nothing is roped off.

  Last year, I became convinced that I’d lost a tampon inside myself. I panicked in the morning when I reached down and couldn’t find a string—I was sure I’d put one in the night before. I pushed my fingers up and became repulsed by my own texture, like taste buds on a tongue. How do other women learn to love their bodies? I feel that I missed out on some phase or lesson. I resent my opening and regard it as nothing more than a liability. And here it was again, causing trouble.

  I couldn’t feel anything, but I knew it was there. I asked Mark for help, which embarrassed both of us. I lay on my back and tried to breathe as he reached inside. He looked at the headboard behind my head, the way a woman looks ahead of herself as she feels around for keys inside a purse. I’d never felt so empty and large in my entire life—I thought maybe he’d just leave his arm inside me, that it’d be easier. Finally, he concluded that he couldn’t feel anything either, but I swore I could still feel it.

  A few hours later, a doctor at Planned Parenthood confirmed the same thing: there was nothing. I’d imagined the entire thing. I felt as if I might be going mad, in the old-fashioned sense of that word, the definition in which a woman gets sent away, locked up. What did the Greeks say about my uterus? I couldn’t remember.

  When I asked Mark what color of polish I should get at the nail salon, he asked, Could you get, like, a chrome color? So that if you looked down at your hands, it would be like ten little mirrors?

  One tug on the signal cord by the diver tells the tender, “I’m all right.”

  At a New Year’s Eve party in high school, my friend and I danced to the song about milkshakes. When the song ended, he pressed a button and made it play again, then he made it play a third time. Finally, the owner of the house said, Stop, dude; I made a playlist. My friend said, No one wants to hear that; we just want to hear this one song. That’s one way to delay a year—we liked this one just fine, we liked our song. At midnight, though, we heard another one.

  Sometimes, I record audio letters and e-mail them to my friend who lives on the other side of the world. A few months ago, I recorded myself during the eclipse. I’m watching it on my roof right now, I said. The moon is obscuring itself, but that wasn’t right—it was just becoming a shadow version of itself. It was covering up its usual face. For a moment I saw a prism effect, as if a piece of glass was shining through it—so many colors at once. And then, like everything at the end: red.

  When I was about five years old, there was one chair my mother never wanted me to touch. It had belonged to her late father, but it was emerald-green velvet and all I wanted to do was crawl all over it. At the same time, I couldn’t stand the sound of my mother’s scolding voice, so I’d get on the chair and call to her, Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me. And then she’d come in from the other room and tell me.

  I won’t make any more promises. I also won’t try to solve you.

  There.

  I think that’s my last promise.

  The Id Speaks, Mid-Transformation

  This is my year, finally—the year of extremes. The leaders aren’t just bad, they’re tyrants; the polar ice caps aren’t just melting, they’re gone; the songwriters of the world aren’t just fading, they’re dead; the moon isn’t just large, it’s super; my bank account balance isn’t just low, it’s meaningless. I see only what’s in front of my face.

  In your bed this morning, I turned on my right side to look at you lying on your back. I cupped my left hand to make a semicircle against your profile and said, I’m gonna put you on a coin one day. Secrecy is our currency, and we’re spending it quicker than we can make it. These days I feel sickened by fragility and tiptoeing—I want to be ruined by something for once. You pointed at the mole beneath my left breast and said, This is my Polaris, and I believed you. We crossed our fingers and our hearts and went north and hoped to die. I try to find solace in art instead of you—seems like a better idea—but I can’t, not all the way. Art is ephemeral; I can’t touch it the way I touch you, measure you, report you. We want to assume the forms of each other, to trade bodies—I leave my life and become you. I have so much hope I don’t even know what I hope for. I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree—everyone is better in theory.

  I once loved a stranger’s specificity more than his lust: each action was written out for me and presented as fact, as if it had already happened—what could I do besides go through with it? I believed in momentum more than I believed in myself, and there I was, thrown.

  My love feels so good when I aim it at an untouchable person, but then I always touch them. You said once that my love kept you alive—No pressure. I want to say, You made me a liar, but that’s not true; you made me alive. I chose to lie in order to keep you out of the picture of my life as everyone else knew it. That’s how I thought I could make you last longer, and I believe I was right. It’s an honor to be so distracted, so consumed, to leave my mind, my priority—forget me, my love, and I will come back, back, back. I long to mark your bed, to make it mine. I want to be the one you remember.

  I like going out alone, so that I’m accountable to no one—I leave without saying goodbye, I keep things for myself, I make memories my own. I find myself looking down on conventional love—my friends and their safe bets. They can’t know what I know. If they did, I’d see it in their eyes. My fire wakes me up in the middle of the night. I don’t know, I suppose I let it.

  I told you I was moved to tears by a speech a former president gave. It’s not that I love politics or even the president—I just love to be convinced, to be guided into feeling exactly what the speaker wants me to feel. I give myself up to oration, to God, which is you when I let it be, when you say mine in my ear. You changed me, I told you, because it was the highest praise I knew.

  In my dreams, I’m bad, but that must mean I can wake up and be my real self, which is good. Right? Dream logic seems fine for the year of extremes in which we live. I become crazed for no reason, I go to sleep without guilt after doing another terrible thing. There is a mystery to our badness—it’s not the things we do but the ease with which we do them. More than anything, I think I’m just surprised with myself, I wrote in my journal. Because now I know what I’m capable of.

  It’s a favor to allow people to think they understand me. How could they, when I’m still so far away from even myself? I hear my own voice on a recording and don’t recognize it, I see an older woman in the mirror and wonder who she is. The mystery of myself grows larger the more I try to solve it. I once thought of myself as a tangle of cords on the floor, buzzing, knotted, half–plugged in, a pile of electric potential. I thought it was better that way. Our fantasies are contagious—we catch each othe
r. I forget which ideas began as my own and which I’ve taken from you. Who adopted whom? We simply became the other; it was easy.

  I never would have thought I’d find someone who could keep a secret better than I can. It’s terrible the way I can’t save anything—nothing stays in the place where I put it. My love gets up, walks away. My career takes off without me. I can’t match my emotions with logic, and I guess that feels good in its own way. I study your face as it changes in the dark—I hope a secret might appear, and that you might be distracted enough to let me unravel it right there, right then. It’s this level of belief in the impossible that allows me to believe in you, in us, in our lasting. We must want each other to break in a way—why else would we take it this far? We must like the idea of burning down our homes and creating one out of the body we share.

  I told you once that there was a button inside your mouth, and you closed your eyes every time I put my thumb inside to press it. I was the only witness to that machine, and you were mine, and, for a while, we worked.

  Small Crimes

  Bianca had the kind of knowledge other girls could sense in her right away—it was as if she had already lived her adult life and had come back to her thirteen-year-old body to tell us about it. The real world was something the rest of us pieced together using clues from television, our imagination, and the things we learned from girls like Bianca.

  The first time I saw her, we were on a boat; she is the only person in my life I can say that about. We were on our way to a beach camp on Catalina Island, off the coast of California. I saw her sitting alone, but she looked comfortable about it, not insecure or lonely. She wore a backward baseball cap and had blond hair and leaned against the railing of the boat, looking effortlessly cool. I was with my friend Emma, a quiet girl like me—we only felt safe in numbers. Emma was friends with other quiet girls like her, but I was always drawn to people who were the opposite of me. If I couldn’t be brave, I could at least be near their courage. If I couldn’t make trouble myself, maybe I could be guilty by association. I saw Bianca on the boat and I decided on her.